Hardwood flooring generally consists of a number of elongated tongue-and-groove type planks individually fitted close to one another and then fastened in position to a subjacent subfloor. To fasten these hardwood planks to the subfloor of a room composed for example of plywood plates or floor joists, it is known to manually use a mallet-operated nailer. Such a nailer generally comprises a main body with a floor-engageable flat shoe mounted to its bottom surface, upon which the tool rests against a hardwood plank prior to discharging a fastener in the latter. Such a nailer also comprises a magazine holding fasteners such as straight metallic L- or T-shaped barbed straight cleats or U-shaped straight staples, and feeding them to a fastener discharge mechanism. With such manual nailers, to fasten a hardwood plank to the subfloor, a workman has to lay the nailer onto a hardwood plank, and then use a mallet to strike an anvil member of the fastener discharge mechanism. When a mallet strikes the anvil member of the tool, a straight and elongated plunger of the fastener discharge mechanism is axially actuated to strike a cleat held in the magazine, this cleat being then forcibly ejected out of the tool.
In order to hide the nail heads, some nailers drive the fasteners through the plank and into the subfloor in an oblique direction, as opposed to being driven in the planks vertically. This is called “blind nailing”.
However, known nailers driving fasteners in an oblique fashion in hardwood planks reach with difficulty areas very close to upright walls. The hardwood planks located parallel to an upright wall in closely spaced fashion cannot be anchored to the subfloor using such nailers, and the fasteners must instead be driven vertically, e.g. using a manual hammer and nail, into the hardwood plank edge portions adjacent to walls.
The invention described in applicant's U.S. Pat. No. 7,303,105 issued Dec. 4, 2007 relates to a nailer for hardwood flooring capable of working directly against an upright wall, but is limited to fasteners being originally arcuate in shape to start with. One drawback of this prior art patent was complexity of its operating mechanism.
A problem with conventional pneumatic nailers is that their nail driver rod must necessarily follow an axially aligned travel path for 100% of their travelling direction, due to the limitation of the straight nailer guide plates. This is a drawback when using straight nails with a nailer, very close to or against an upright wall or other obstacle over the work surface.